


somebody famous (at least for a day)

by hedgebitch



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Video Game World, Book: Heir Apparent, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gotham, NO CAPES, Stephanie Brown is Robin, and spoiler and batgirl but mostly robin, except yes capes. but the capes are in the video game?, so is the character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29986491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgebitch/pseuds/hedgebitch
Summary: It’s gotta say something that Steph’s absent-by-way-of-federal-prison father got out and sent her a giftcard to spend an afternoon immersed in a game at the WayneTech Arcade downtown instead of like, actually spending any time with her. But it’s non-transferable and worth its weight in gold, so she’s dead-set on using it on the latest flopped release from the WayneTech VR Labs game dev team.
Relationships: Stephanie Brown & Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown & Cassandra Cain, Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake
Comments: 22
Kudos: 22





	1. heir apparent

**Author's Note:**

> this work is loosely based off of the novel heir apparent by vivian vande velde. the base premise is the same, and chapter titles are based on titles from the book, but rather than a medieval fantasy, the game in question is instead a condensation of steph's runs as spoiler, robin, and batgirl, with liberties taken where i felt like it because comics aren't real anyways. how messed up would that be am i right

Stephanie runs a finger over the hard edge of the plastic card where it sits in her right coat pocket. 

It’s not that she’s nervous about having forgotten it. But, well. A giftcard for even sixty minutes of full immersion VR at the WayneTech Arcade is worth half her mom’s bimonthly paycheck. And the card in her pocket, with its dumb little holographic dinosaur trying to eat a jack-in-the-box, proudly declares that it can be redeemed for four hours of gameplay. 

Of course, if someone did try to steal it from her, they’d be in for a nasty surprise. When Steph checks in at the arcade, they don’t just check her name with the one registered for the card on file—the employee at the desk checks her ID, then locks up her phone and wallet behind the desk as collateral. 

“Alright,” he says, once he’s handed Steph the numbered key fob for her locker. “Were you looking to play a few shorter games or jump right into one of our longer ones?”

Steph fidgets nervously. Even if the computer system hadn’t told him, it feels glaringly obvious from her old phone and ratty shoes that she’s not exactly a regular. 

“Could you explain how the giftcard payment works with different game times?”

“So our games are grouped into times of how long we expect customers to spend playing them. Normally, if you play a two hour game, you’re charged for two hours of gameplay, no matter how long it takes you to complete. Our giftcards work a little differently—if you finish a game early, that time saved stays on your card. If you start a three hour game with only two hours left on your card, you’ll get an option to add an additional form of payment or leave your game early when time runs out. The one exception to timing out is if you start a game with enough money on your card to pay for the standard rate—you get a fifteen minute grace period to finish, and once that’s up, you get to finish out your last life or level.”

“What are the best longer ones?” Steph asks. 

The attendant takes a look at her, so she takes one right back at him. Whatever he decides about her based on her appearance must be accurate enough, because of the list of games he pulls up on the monitor for her to look over, none seem genuinely awful. 

“Alien Conflict is one of our most popular four hour games. It’s combat based with an option to connect to an online multiplayer section that lets you fight against and team up with online players at home and in other WayneTech centers.”

That one’s a hard no—Steph’s here for an escape. Getting pitted against players rich enough to afford their own equipment is just day to day life on steroids.

“There’s Pandemic—that one’s not as exciting as it sounds, it’s supposed to be a zombie RPG, but there’s a lot of strategy and sitting around waiting.”

Steph shakes her head and he moves on.

“Crowned is pretty popular with—with clients matching your profile,” he stutters, and Steph wonders what exactly her profile is. “You play a peasant who discovers they’re royalty—it’s a little hard for first time players because of how easy it is to miss out on the ending you want early on.”

Well, that’s out, too then. It’s not like she can afford to come back for a second playthrough. Besides, medieval Sofía the First isn’t exactly calling out to her.

He skips straight over the next one in the system and starts explaining the one after, and Steph’s gut reaction is to be insulted.

“What was that one you skipped?” she asks, and he hesitantly clicks back over.

“Oh, uh, Heir Apparent. You asked for popular games, and this one gets kind of dark, plus it’s not exactly a crowd pleaser.”

“What’s it about?” Steph asks. The cover image isn’t super clear about the premise—a dark shadow looming over a figure in a gold cape, staring out at a skyline that looks weirdly familiar. She’d guess it’s some kind of superhero shtick but—but that building in the distance… it’s Wayne Enterprises. The game is set in Gotham.

“It’s kind of a vigilante deal? It’s a little experimental—it’s the first one made by this designer, and it’s definitely one of our most open world games—you won’t get stuck needing specific objects like in Crowned—but it is super easy to die. Marketing wanted to release an easier, nicer version of the game, to market it to kids, but rumour has it Bruce Wayne himself okayed only releasing the M-rated version.”

“It’s rated M?” Steph asks in total shock. It’s gotta be new, she realizes. There’s no way A Million Moms wouldn’t be boycotting the VR version of Bloons Tower Defense if they knew WayneTech also had this out.

“It’s mostly because of gore. There are no sexually explicit experiences for the player character, but it does tap into pain receptors more than any of our other games, and I think everyone in tech and marketing all kind of agreed to make it off limits for minors.”

“It’s… it is safe, though, right?” Steph asks, and immediately regrets it, because it makes her sound like one of those paranoid idiots insisting that VR games cause school shootings.

“WayneTech immersion VR software implements a gradual immersion process that cushions your experiences and memories to prevent trauma responses from developing or triggering for the duration of your immersion,” he recites by rote.

“Bet that kind of tech could do a lot more good in psychotherapy,” Steph says without thinking, and the employee grins at her.

“You’d have to talk to WayneTech about that,” he says, and it strikes her that this is a Wayne Enterprises owned business—statistically it’s likely he’s an ex-felon just as outraged by the waste of resources as she is.

“If it helps,” he adds as an afterthought, “the tech tells your brain what it’s experiencing, but your brain is responsible for signalling your nerves. So you can’t feel more pain than you’ve already actually experienced. The pain you do feel, even in the game, will be a bit dimmed down, and it’ll fade quickly, too.”

“What’s the goal? Of the game, I mean?”

“You get to pick,” he tells her. “You have to keep the big guy in charge happy if you don’t want the hardest playthrough, but there are always different plots running throughout the city—you’ll see how they add up. Just be who you want to be. ”

Well. That half-assed explanation settles it. Steph tells him she’ll go for it without bothering to watch the trailer.

“Listen, I’m not supposed to tell you this,” the employee tells Steph as he helps her hook up wires in the cubicle she’ll be spending the next four hours in. “But you’re gonna want all the time you can get, so I’ll go ahead and warn you now. The game starts in media res.”

“What?” Steph asks, because. What.

“It starts in a fight. It’s supposed to be a little tutorial, to show you what dying feels like. Go in ready to fight, and you get an immediate stats boost and don’t get set back by the reset.”

“Oh,” Steph says as he starts to close the divider and lock her in. “Thanks.”

There’s a small joystick on the right arm of the bed—she’s been given a rundown on how to differentiate between the VR and her physical reality in order to operate it, but really its only purpose, beyond allowing her a small amount of control over setting adjustments for accessibility reasons, is to start the immersion process. She takes a deep breath, leans her head back, closes her eyes, and presses her thumb into the button on top of the joystick.

The arcade employee hadn’t really gone into much detail about the process beyond his required spiel, but Steph had researched it herself, back when WayneTech opened its first VR arcade, and it had been all over the news for three weeks straight. It takes one to three minutes, depending on how active the brain in question is, and one woman from Des Moines who claimed to have retained memories from the womb was interviewed on the nightly news, saying the sensation was remarkably similar. 

After clicking the button, the first thing Steph tries to do, without even thinking about it, is open her eyes. They feel open, but she still sees only the backs of her eyelids, slightly illuminated by the dim light in her cubicle. Sight is the last sense to calibrate to the VR: Steph’s pretty sure she remembers reading that this was designed on purpose—to keep the player from getting overwhelmed before panic responses are under the machine’s control.

A warm tingle-y feeling crosses over her body, starting in her fingers and toes and moving inwards towards her center, like…well, kind of like something dirty. As it passes over her, she becomes aware of a few immediate changes. She can no longer feel the fabric of her blouse or her jeans—instead she feels skintight leggings and something heavy and tunic-like on top. She wonders a bit at how gender factors into the detailed programming—she walked into the arcade with the exposed underwire of a slightly-too-old bra digging into her side, but now she can feel a nylon sports bra.

Thin gloves press against her hands, and her hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail—another quandary re: attention to detail—covered by some kind of hood. There’s a weird feeling against her face—some kind of mask, most likely. None of her skin is exposed, but even through the weighty material, she can feel a cool breeze cutting straight through to her bones.

Smell comes next: she hardly notices its arrival at first, as used to the streets of Gotham as she is. There’s something distinctive about the breezy emptiness of it all that lets her know it’s nighttime, before she can even taste the city’s smell, dark like ash in her throat and achingly familiar.

As her sight starts to come in, she remembers what the attendant told her. In media res. She moves into a defensive stance, one she remembers from the kickboxing class she took at the community center last June.

She’s standing on a rooftop somewhere in the bowery. It’s late enough that she can’t hear cars passing by on the street immediately below her. There are no bad guys immediately apparent, so she scans the rooftop for anything she can fight with. 

Nothing seems super weapon-y, but there’s a loose brick on the wall of the roof access door, so she pries it off. Bludgeoning blindly is better than nothing, she figures. 

Still no baddies. She’s just starting to wonder if the attendant was just fucking with her when she hears some kind of thwip from the side of the building. A figure swings up over the far edge of the roof, and she’s beaming her brick straight at it before she even registers what it is. 

“Ow,” a voice—human, male, maybe a few years her younger—says, and as Steph takes another look, she recognizes that the figure is wearing the yellow cape she saw in the game poster. 

Oops. 

Memories surge into Steph’s mind, kind of the way she wishes they would during org chem tests. This guy is Robin. Sidekick to Batman. Batman’s a little spooky but he keeps Gotham safe from creepy crawly criminals. Robin is nicer and newer—a flash of blue as the image of an older, graduated Robin comes to mind. Definitely one of the good guys. 

And definitely not elated to have been hit in the face with a brick. 

“I don’t know who you think you are,” he tells her, “but _duck_.”

The fake memories in Steph’s head tell her to trust Robin, and she figures she might as well obey—which is good, because a flurry of throwing stars immediately flies over her head, a few bouncing off the roof access door, and the rest bouncing off the staff Robin swings around to deflect them. 

The ninja responsible for throwing the stars are not far behind. Apparently, videogame Steph has a few more fighting instincts than regular Steph—she falls in line with Robin and even manages to take one or two out herself. 

She just barely dodges a dagger from the last ninja, and finds herself appreciating the attendant’s warning. There’s no way she’d have made it through that fight sequence if she’d still been staring in awe at her surroundings. And she hadn’t understood what exactly he’d meant by stats boost, but the way a few basic moves she’s otherwise unfamiliar with flood into her brain right as the fight peters out, she’s pretty sure it’s gone through. 

Score one for not dying. 

“Okay, now _talk_ ,” Robin commands when the last ninja is out cold. 

“What, like, right now?” Steph asks, staring incredulously at the bossy costumed manchild in front of her.

“They’re not going anywhere,” he points out. “Who are you?”

An answer rises up to the front of Steph’s mind, so she blurts it out. “Spoiler.”

“Spoilers for what?” Robin asks. 

“No, me,” Steph tells him. “I’m Spoiler.”

Objectively Steph knows that the VR immersion system can’t read her thoughts in any way that matters, that it just maps facts and dynamics into her mind, and lets her brain do all the work required to make sense. Objectively she knows that even the readouts on the monitor tracking her progress through the game don’t record the thoughts in her head or the way she processes the memories it feeds her. 

But holy shit, when she finds memories of her dad dressed up as some wackjob calling himself Cluemaster does she hope no one’s taking notes. It’s embarrassing enough that he’s spent half her life in prison. She does not need this kind of fuel added to the fire. 

Spoiler’s backstory seems pretty cut and dry, and fits Stephanie’s actual life just a little too closely for comfort. She’s out tonight as a vigilante to stop her father’s criminal plots. Of course, instead of testifying against him in a burglary case, Gotham-on-steroids has led this disgruntled daughter to dressing up in purple curtains and heading out at night to catch him in the act of plotting nefariously with his henchmen. Robin doesn’t need to know all of that, though—and neither does WayneTech. 

“I’m trying to stop Cluemaster,” she opts to tell him, and then figures she’s the main character, so why not be a little more assertive about it. “You can help, or you can stop interrogating me on this rooftop.”

“Cluemaster? Really? _That’s_ your target?” Robin asks, and Steph wants to pick that brick right back up and hit him again. Or better yet, hit whatever game designer thought it’d be funny to make the first NPC in the game such an asshole.

Steph crosses her arms and glares at him, then remembers the mask covering her face.

“I don’t see you making any progress,” she tells him, as frostily as she can manage. Robin appears to decide she means business, and changes track.

“Look—Spoiler—I’m really not trying to make fun of you. But Batman and I haven’t stopped Cluemaster because he’s not exactly priority number one, if you catch my drift. Still, when we do move on him, we have training, we have equipment that’ll give us the advantage. You’re going to get hurt. Go home.”

“Fine,” Steph says, then wonders what would happen if she did actually go home and give up. Would the game restart? Would it funnel her back towards vigilantism? The attendant had said this is the most open world game WayneTech has designed to date—she’d be pretty disappointed if it didn’t at least let her try to roleplay at just going about life and going to school and shit. 

“I’ll go home,” she tells Robin.

But Steph’s not a quitter, and she’s especially not a listener of condescending boys in tights.

Cute boys in tights maybe. But not condescending ones.

When she looks up across the roof, she knows which way home is. She runs the opposite direction, not bothering to check if Robin follows her. If he does, all it means is the game probably wants her to go home to finish out this intro.

After what feels like a couple minutes, she comes across two men dressed in—dressed in green bodysuits with question mark motifs?—that after a moment, Spoiler’s memories tell her are the Riddler’s henchmen. They’re accosting some woman in the back alley of a seedy bar, and Steph is not gonna be happy if this game turns out to be full GTA. An instinct—from Spoiler, probably, except Steph is pretty angry too right now—tells her to leap off the roof and onto one of the men, and Steph figures she might as well give it a shot.

She takes out the two thugs and hands the nice lady her purse back. When the woman asks who Steph is, why she saved her, Steph knows she should probably tell her she’s Spoiler, should probably focus on building her reputation, but she can’t resist the opportunity for a “I’m just doing what’s right, ma’am,” line, so she takes the L on that one.

Content with her save, Steph decides it’s time to head home on her own terms. She stops a few more instances of petty crime along the way, figures out a little bit more about how the fighting instincts work and how to not get punched in the face for accidentally overriding an instinctive dodge. 

After snatching her second purse snatcher, she gets that itchy feeling on the back of her neck like someone’s watching her. It takes her a few more streets to realize she should be looking up, not down, and that’s where she finally catches a glimpse of her tail.

Or, well, of a dark and ominous person-shaped shadow watching her from a few rooftops away. Too small to be the Big Spooky, so Steph mentally labels them Spooky 2.0, even as her false memories remind her of Batgirl’s story—both the redheaded woman who mysteriously disappeared, and her silent successor. This shadow must be her—the new one, that is.

A loud cry a few blocks over snaps Steph out of her contemplation, and she forgets her tail for a second to go check it out—another purse snatching, two against one. How many purses can get stolen in one night?

Steph goes after the gal with the purse first, but before she can turn to even look for her friend, she hears a thunk, followed by groans that suggest someone else has taken care of him for her. Sure enough, when she turns around she’s greeted by one of the most terrifying sights of her life, and also maybe the coolest person in the entire world.

Batgirl hangs back in the shadows while Steph returns the purse to its rightful owner, but doesn’t take off or worse, tell Steph off. Actually, she doesn’t say anything at all. Just stares, really.

“You the quiet type?” Steph asks, trying to gauge whether or not this one shares the same opinion as Robin.

Batgirl tilts her head a little, but doesn’t speak. After a moment’s consideration she lifts her hands, makes a gesture Steph is about to tell her she can’t understand when she realizes that actually, she can understand it, that her brain for some reason recognizes the motion as “no way,” which okay, hold up. How is that even working. Did someone invent technology that could put a whole entire language in someone’s brain and then say “yep, the gamers are gonna love this?”

Rather than look a gift-bat in the mouth, Steph takes this opportunity to find out if she can sign back—answer: yes. So Steph chats Batgirl’s eyes off for as long as the vigilante lets her, which Steph realizes, too late to stop it, is as long as it takes to get to Steph’s block.

“Traitor,” Steph hopes she signs, and Batgirl laughs as she swings off into the distance.

The apartment the game has designated as Spoiler’s is only a block away from the one Steph grew up in, and she quickly resigns herself to not thinking too hard about the implications of that.

As she approaches the building, she sees flashes of gloved hands cracking open a window, so she heads around to the fire escape and climbs into her bedroom instead of trying the door. Once she’s pulled the blinds shut—are these the same blinds from her childhood bedroom because they’re what she remembers, or because the designers used a real building for their research, or because all blinds kind of look the same?—she’s overcome by an artificial exhaustion. Steph debates seeing what happens if she ignores it, the way she ignored Robin earlier, but figures feelings are more like thoughts than anything, and it’s in her best interest to listen. She takes off the homemade costume, folding it and shoving it out of sight under the bed, before collapsing on top of the comforter.


	2. treasure hunt

A second ago, Steph was exhausted, collapsed horizontally onto a twin bed. When she opens her eyes, the scene in front of her has completely changed. 

She hadn’t realized VR had the capability to program cuts like that—actually, now that she’s no longer battling fake exhaustion, she can remember overhearing a few classmates at GU complaining about some game that had long sleep scenes taking up large chunks of gametime. Those complaints had all been about the unnecessary realism, but the transition Steph has just experienced was seamless.

She closed her eyes to a teenager’s bedroom. Now, she’s opened them to a city street, at dusk. And she’s in motion.

Okay, actually the waking up to walking thing is a little weird—she stumbles for a second, over her own moving feet. Or maybe that’s what the devs wanted to happen? There’s a small slip of paper on the ground, and when Steph picks it up, all it says are three words, blue ink in a just barely legible chicken scratch: “run to skip.”

Oh. Oh.

The guys in her class had also complained about this—the way immersion games tend to have long opening credits sequences, like in old movies. Steph invests herself in watching out for the names of the creative team that decided to release a giant fuck you by combining their biggest complaints into the coolest fucking sequence in the entire game.

Because it is—cool, that is. Obviously, it’s Steph’s first time playing any immersion game, and she’s not much of a gamer in general, but the way names are incorporated into the world around her—a truck honks at the light, and she looks over instinctively, sees the WayneTech VR Labs logo spread across its side. 

She looks back in front of her, and a man carrying a few too many bags of groceries trips—she reaches out to give him a hand, and finds herself holding a business card for one T. J. Drake, responsible for design, story, and programming. A couple feet later, she notices the street sign ahead of her is a cross street between Tamara Fox Avenue and Writtenby Street.

She takes her time meandering through the street, looking for every name she can find—on coffee cups, on delivery trucks, on anything and everything that might have words. If fucking Trevor from 10am stats were here, he’d be livid watching Steph waste her time like this. But it’s a four hour game, and she’s got four hours. Might as well spend a little bit of time appreciating the people who poured their lives into a game that arcade attendants habitually skip over.

Sirens speed past her on the avenue, and Steph realizes the lighthearted stroll vibes are no longer anywhere to be found. Instinct tells her to reach down to her side: she does, only to find her hand holding the black grapple gun Robin had swung up to the roof on. It takes her another two seconds to process that at some point, as she walked through the credits sequence, her costume had changed. No DIY purple curtains anymore—she’s wearing the red, green, and gold of Batman’s sidekick.

Recalling the attendant’s warning to keep the big guy happy for an easier playthrough, she catches up on new memories as she uses the grapple to start swinging herself towards the sirens.

She’s Robin. That’s new, but the game premise makes a bit more sense now. 

She still has yet to meet the boy in blue, mister original, the Robin she now has memories of a surly man in a dark cowl comparing her to. But when she thinks about those memories of being compared to Robins more successful than her, another image pops into her mind—a suit in a glass case, the only lit object in an otherwise vantablack-dark room.

The Robin who died. The one not to emulate. Kind of a weird detail to add in a timeskip. 

Steph barely has a second to wonder if it’s Asshole Robin, before the game sends her a flash of a young man in a newly designed costume. So Asshole Robin is still somewhere out in the world, and—that can’t be right, she thinks, trying to blink away the red, yellow, and black her false memories have supplied her with.

Nope, it sure is right. Asshole Robin sure seems to have graduated to “Red Robin.” He’s not happy with her being Robin—Steph thinks their personal relationship stats might’ve taken a hit when he took a brick to the face—but staying out in the tutorial seems to have earned her his begrudging, condescending respect. 

When she arrives at the building the police car was headed to, Batman is there to meet her.

“Robin,” he says, gruff, and deep enough that it’s gotta be hurting his throat. “You’re late.”

Steph wonders if opting for a hard playthrough would be worth it for the chance to slap this guy.

“Sorry,” she says instead, and then, because she can’t help it, “traffic.”

Batman ignores her snarky aside. “One of Black Mask’s top men is dead inside. Head cleanly severed from the neck post-mortem.”

Black Mask—dude with a dumb skull fetish who runs the biggest gang in town. Somehow not the stupidest supervillain gimmick around.

Sirens sound off again in the distance.

“This is the second beheaded henchman reported in the last half hour,” Batman finishes up. “See what you can find here. I’ll make sure that’s not a third. Reconvene at the cave.”

He disappears into the background of the night with a swoosh of his cape, like a dracula, or like that kid in the hoodie when Steph took her driver’s test.

Steph takes a moment to actually get a bearing on her surroundings, then heads into the crime scene. Memories surge into her mind—Batman lecturing her on basic forensics, on crime scene investigation—and she keeps them in mind as she takes a look around.

The scene is a bloody mess. Not as bloody as she thinks such a scene would logically be in real life, but definitely enough so that she’s thankful for her strong stomach. The patterns and quantity of the spatters are a little confusing, until Steph remembers that Batman has already told her the victim was beheaded after he had already died. Instead, it looks like the cause of death is a bullet to the heart. Steph’s _Steph_ instinct is that police forensics should be able to determine ballistics, but her Spoiler—well, Robin—instinct is to take the bullet and pop it into her own evidence baggy. She fervently hopes that instinct’s the right one as she indulges it, taking photos through the camera that’s apparently in her mask as she does so.

She covers the rest of the scene as quickly as she can before the cops finally make it in through the locked door, then heads off towards—towards Batman’s secret headquarters, which, apparently. Are in an actual literal batcave. Is he part bat? Is she part bird now?

Steph works her way through the new skills she’s gotten from the timeskip as she makes her way back to the cave—interrupting a couple petty crimes, swinging around a few buildings, stealthily sneaking in through the cave entrance—just to make sure she’s got the hang of them. It’s that last one, sneaking into the cave, that serves as its own added bonus. She manages to catch the tail end of an argument, between Batman and—and the original Robin. Nightwing.

“—you planning on telling me any of this?” she can hear Batman asking over the comms from where he’s sitting at the—oh jeez. It’s called the batcomputer.

“When Oracle gave the go ahead. Which she did. Look, I’m only even telling you now because if someone’s cleaning up shop in Gotham _and_ in Blüdhaven, I figure it might be more about _us_ than it is about them. There’s no—”

He cuts off abruptly to background noise a little too fuzzy for Steph to make out.

“I gotta go, talk later,” he says, and this time Steph can hear whoever he’s fighting yell out in pain after taking a hit, just before Nightwing cuts off his feed.

“What did you find, Robin?” Batman asks without preamble, or even turning around to face her.

So this is where Asshole Robin gets it from. Good to know.

She gives a report, trying her best to border on professional, like she’s presenting a powerpoint in class. Batman is receptive in a way that Steph thinks might be uncharacteristic—hopefully that’s not an indicator that her tutorial run has him more pissed off than he should be.

He pulls up Robin’s camera content on one monitor, his own cowl feed on another, leaving up some crime scene photos taken directly from the Blüdhaven Police Department’s internal system.

“Two bodies. Both killed by pistol shots directly to the heart, one from about a hundred feet and the other from about nine.”

Steph’s was the body at nine feet, her new knowledge of ballistics and blood spatters tells her.

“Both beheaded immediately after death, both heads taken. Four other high ranking members in various Gotham gangs are missing. And you caught the tail end of Nightwing finally seeing fit to let me know several of Blockbuster’s men in Blüdhaven have been taken out by an unknown suspect.”

“You think they’re connected?” Steph asks. Like, okay, the Gotham ones make sense, of course they’re connected, multiple people don’t just spontaneously get their heads stolen. But none of the Blüdhaven murders share that particular gruesomeness—no post-mortem mutilations to be found.

“Of course they’re connected,” Asshole Robin says, and Steph could kick herself at how smug he looks at the fact that she didn’t notice him entering the cave, even through the whites of his domino mask.

“The marksmanship necessary for these hits—this perp’s had serious training. All of the Gotham victims and targets have high spots on distribution chains, and the Blüdhaven targets are a bit lower down. If he’s”—because of course a perp like this would have to be a man, Steph wants to point out—“looking to take out competition in Gotham, taking control of Blüdhaven’s demand is a surefire strategy to get started.”

But then Red Robin’s demeanor changes, his arrogance softening into something Steph’s a lot more familiar with as he looks to Batman for approval. “Right?”

Batman either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about Red Robin’s desperation.

“If he’s”—god _again_ with the he’s—“working for a new player, that player’s yet to make an appearance in the game. And why the mutilation? Why bother striking fear before he’s shown his face?”

“Yeah, why would anyone combine anonymity and fear as a tactic, that’d be crazy,” Red Robin mutters, but Batman’s too concerned by the missing heads to give a shit.

“I don’t want either of you getting too involved with this case, not until I know who’s calling the shots on this assassin,” he orders.

“I don’t work your cases anymore,” Red Robin says, just a little too bitter to be casual. “I’m just here for the new cowl design, and then I’ll be on my way.”

So Batman’s got two former proteges on bad terms. Great. That bodes well for Steph’s chances.

Batman and Red Robin make up by geeking out over some specs, and eventually Red Robin trades out his domino for a beak-like cowl with some unfortunate connotations. It’s kind of a shame, Steph can’t help but think. His face is the only part of him she’s enjoyed so far.

After Red Robin makes his exit, heading off to his own team or something like that, Batman gives Steph what she can only interpret as busywork. She roots through the profiles they have on gang members both dead and missing, attempting to find any clues or bits of information that’ll indicate either the perp’s next target, or what exactly they’re doing with several fresh human heads.

Batman himself moves on to a different case—something with the mayor and some borderline fascist secret police squadrons rumoured to have cropped up. Actually, Steph’s pretty sure this plotline might be inspired by the mayor that was removed from office a few years back, for—well, the official reason was something weird and complicated regarding fraud, but the guy had a mental breakdown on live television in which he admitted to reallocating funds to the GCPD to fight off his own paranoid delusions.

Steph is definitely more interested in the secret police than she is in the gang assassin, and when she returns to the cave before the next night’s patrol to be given yet another research assignment, she finds herself lamenting her fate. Until, that is, she remembers the whole she’s-the-main-character part. The attendant hadn’t actually lied to her, and his brief explanation of the game seemed to imply that no matter what the player chooses to do, Gotham City has a set timeline of events.

So maybe Batman set out on his own to confront the mayor or whatever. Somewhere out there, there’s still a killer with a gun and a machete working out their weekend plans, and Steph’s got a list of potential dates in her very hands. With any luck, Batman’ll be so busy with his cool fun case that he won’t even realize Robin’s flying solo. Worst case scenario is Steph’ll have to try to convince him she thought he wanted her to case the potential victims in person as well as through the batcomputer files.

She heads for the bowery, feeling more and more at home in her skin the closer she gets. The first location she heads to is a laundromat just off of Park Row that Falcone’s been using as a front for some new shady shit Steph didn’t bother to look too hard into. They’re dealing, is what matters—and they weren’t too high up on the food chain, but with the disruption in Black Mask’s organization, they’ll be rising soon enough. So either Falcone’s sending someone out to make that upward mobility just a little bit smoother, or he’ll be next on the list. Either way—it’s worth a shot to check it out.

She parks the R-cycle a little ways away, and switches it over to street mode—just because she’s reasonably confident the algorithm’s punishment for disobeying Batman’s direct orders won’t be too harsh doesn’t mean she’s looking to tack getting her bike stolen onto the list of charges against her. Plus, well, okay, obviously she’s in a fake game that isn’t real and so money is also made up and not real, because running this kind of vigilante enterprise would cost a fucking fortune, but—but Steph isn’t used to having toys this nice. She’s gonna be as careful as she can with it.

She skipped out on the cape in order to wear street clothes over her uniform. She doesn’t have any in-game evidence to suggest it, but Steph knows this city, knows the people that belong in it, and something tells her not everyone in the bowery will appreciate a visit from one of the vigilantes frequently responsible for removing their livelihood. 

It turns out to have been the best idea of her virtual-life—because she catches sight of Red Robin’s cowl, poking up for just a split second, over the edge of the roof of the building across the street from the laundromat.

Steph takes a moment to weigh her options. There’s a solid chance the algorithm will favour him recognizing her, even without her domino mask on. It’ll slow her down a little, having to explain herself to him and deal with his general assholery, but he’s not supposed to be here either—it’s not like he can snitch to Batman.

On the other hand—if he’s here, if the game has this character here at this time—well, then this must be the right place. If she can get in and out, if she can figure out what’s going on before Red Robin does, she might be able to get some credit for solving the case.

But then she remembers the desperation, plain as the light of day even under Red Robin’s mask, and she just can’t bring herself to steal this find from him.

It would be an underhanded move, she tries to tell herself as justification. It won’t earn her even begrudging respect from him, not the way throwing the brick did, and it might even upset Batman if he starts to think she’s dishonest. But the truth of it is, Steph can relate to father figures with impossible expectations—even if her father’s are a bit lacking in the noble intent department. And regardless of the fact that he’s both not real and an asshole—Steph doesn’t want to watch Red Robin crash and burn.

Handing the investigation over isn’t an option either, though. Steph agonizes for a painful in-game minute, then decides on a middle ground. She strolls confidently—but not, like, too confidently—towards the laundromat. Unless Red Robin has suddenly lost his vision, that should give him every opportunity to see her, every opportunity for the algorithm to let him recognize her as Robin.

He spots her with however much time he needs to figure that she’s—well, that she’s _her_ —just before she walks in the door. Steph knows this, because the comm in her ear flickers to life right before she can grab the handle.

“Robin, don’t go in,” he warns her, and Steph pulls the civilian phone out of her pocket so she can call him out without looking crazy.

“I’m just looking around,” she tells him, hoping he gets that she’s not against collaboration and not for it either.

“Caucasian male, dark hair, early twenties or late teens. There’s your recon done, just don’t go inside.”

“Why not?” Steph asks, glancing through the glass doors and windows to see if she can spot the guy in question.

“Because he’s got at least one M1911 under his jacket, and he wasn’t dumb enough to leave any of the other victims with witnesses.

“Nice catch. Too late, though, bird brain,” a different voice says, distantly but through the same channel. They’re using some kind of vocal modulator that Robin’s mediocre street tech isn’t capable of deciphering, and she whirls around to check Red Robin’s rooftop location.

She can’t see anything, can only hear Red Robin grunting in pain from whatever his assailant is doing to him. She heads across the street as quick as she can without raising suspicion, skirts around the side of the building to scale the fire escape. 

Over the comms—she should ask about how to leave the mic running the way Red Robin’s is now, that’s probably a good safety feature to keep in mind—she can hear his attacker taking the time to gloat.

“I gotta say, I was expecting more than a cheap imitation. Tell me, where’d the Bat find you again?”

“Fuck off,” Red Robin says, and then grunts with the force of an unexpected impact. Shit. She sheds her street clothes quick as she can, doing her best to keep track of the attacker’s voice all the while.

“No wonder he snatched that new Robin up. No way you were enough to fill the hole Batgirl left.”

“What do you want?” Red Robin manages to bite out as Steph dons her domino, starts to climb from the fire escape to the roof.

“Maybe for you to outgrow the leotard, to drop the name that was never yours. Or, even better,” the voice muses, “maybe I just want to drop you.”

Red Robin doesn’t respond to the threat—and his attacker doesn’t seem to care, more interested in Steph’s capeless appearance.

“That’s cute,” she hears the modulated voice say both over her comms and in front of her. “Clipped wings.”

Steph takes stock of the situation. A—okay, so he is a guy, whatever—in a leather jacket, with a red motorcycle-looking helmet that conceals every feature of his face stands, watching her, taunting her, all the way on the opposite side of the roof. Red Robin is out for the count, unconscious about halfway from Steph to mister creepazoid.

“I don’t get it,” she starts to stall, not sure what to do but sure as shit this guy should probably not be getting away. “If you’re mad at Batman for taking on a new Robin, why is your beef with Red Robin? Why aren’t you taking it out on me?”

“Oh, please,” Helmet Guy scoffs. “Like you could ever be a real Robin.”

“I _am_ a real Robin,” Steph insists, and then hates herself for floundering for this asshat’s approval. 

“A real Robin,” Helmet Guy points out, not without humour, “would have noticed the bomb.”

Steph hears the distinctive click of some kind of trigger, right before Helmet Guy disappears into a cloud of smoke, the dramatic little fuck that he is. 

Fuck. Fuck shit fuck fuck _fuck_. 

She scrambles to Red Robin and heaves his—surprisingly solid—limp form over her shoulder. She makes a run for it towards the next building, hoping like hell that her grapple will be able to support their combined weight, and that she won’t accidentally swing backwards under the weight of her… unexpected carry-on item.

Steph manages to lug him safely out of the way, but she can’t make it back to his lookout to stop the bomb before it’s set off. Her first thought is to take him all the way back to the cave, but before she can even consider the problem of the Batcave is in Bristol and she came here on a motorcycle, which is not super-well equipped to allow her to cart an unconscious—teen? twenty something?—around, she knows exactly what she’s going to do.

She needs to make sure nothing but her pride—and maybe a bit of Red Robin’s—got hurt.

Steph swings back to the laundromat as fast as her web-less legs will let her, and finds a few civilians already rooting through the rubble. She joins them in their search, even if it’s solidly in sidequest territory.

It’s the right thing to do. What’s the point of paying to live in a fantasy video game world and not even bothering to do the right thing?

The building wasn’t occupied—the people Steph helps pull out were pedestrians caught unawares by its collapse. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think Red Hood picked this location on purpose.

But she’s seen the crime scenes. She knows what this guy is capable of.

Red Robin makes his way back to her just as she’s making sure every last civilian is accounted for. He looks surprisingly okay, if a little unsteady on his feat, and Steph wonders for a moment if the quickly fading pain applies to NPCs too, until she remembers that this is a game, and the characters aren’t capable of sentience or feelings—just programmed to replicate them.

“Took you long enough,” she chides him, hoping his reaction will let her gauge how he’s doing.

“I think I might be concussed,” he confesses to her, and the fact that he’s confessing to weakness at all is enough in and of itself for Steph to confirm his self-diagnosis.

Her first thought is to get him back to the Batcave, where there’s like, medical equipment and shit. Her second thought is that she has no idea how long helping out the folks caught in the explosion took, so she has no surefire way of knowing if Batman’s still out working his own case or if he’s back at the cave, and truly no way of determining if Red Robin’s put together enough to back her up on a solid alibi. She could take him to her apartment—it’s not far from here—but while she has no idea what her mom’s in-game schedule is, she does know that no version of Crystal Brown would be elated to find out her daughter is running around with masked vigilantes. 

“Is there somewhere we can hunker down?” she asks Red Robin, and he grabs at her arm without asking, then pulls up a location on her gauntlet before she even has time to be mad about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick note on the credits scene/game in general now that you've seen past the tutorial: heir apparent was published in 2002. obviously VR games like. exist now. i'm not expecting yall to be familiar with the novel so these two chapters were basically my attempt to differentiate this game from modern vr. feel free to let me know if i've failed majorly!


	3. family history

Red Robin seems a little addled from his proximity to the blast slash getting beat on by a fella Steph would wager outshines her in the daddy issues department. Not so addled, as it turns out, that he can’t lead her to a safehouse, about twelve blocks from their current location. 

Steph makes Red Robin share the R-cycle with her, because, despite his protests, it’s built with emergencies like this in mind, and can comfortably seat two, so long as each of those two is conscious.

Inside, once they’ve made it through the various layers of security and alarms, Red Robin walks Steph through walking _him_ through concussion protocol, which is equal parts humiliating and irritating. Why is this the one part of Robin training Steph doesn’t get to remember?

She has to really bully him into it, but he takes his cowl off so she can check his eye movement and his pupils, and Steph is yet again humiliated, this time let down by her own goddamn mind when she catches herself thinking that he has nice eyes. 

“So,” she says, to snap herself out of that dumb trance. “What do you think his deal was?”

“I’ve got no fucking clue,” Red Robin tells her. “I mean, would any particular person come to mind if I asked you who would have the training to pull half the shit he’s pulled, strong opinions on what makes someone Robin, and a grudge against me personally to boot?”

“I mean, yeah,” Steph says, because, well. Someone does in fact come to mind. “But I have it on good authority that he’s dead.”

Red Robin freezes when he realizes what she’s implying. 

“There’s no way,” he says, in a way that Steph takes to mean that there absolutely is a way, or at least, that he thinks there might be. 

“How exactly did he die, again?” Steph asks, her fuzzy false memory suggesting that neither Batman nor Red Robin ever actually told her. 

Red Robin looks sick to his stomach, and Steph hopes like hell her assessment of him as concussion-free is accurate because she’s really not looking to get puked on, even virtually. 

“There was an explosion,” he says. 

“Well, shit,” Steph says. “Dying in an explosion and attempting to kill your successor via another certainly smacks of something, don’t it?”

“Just because I’ve had a mild head injury doesn’t mean I’m going to forget about Occam’s Razor.”

Ugh. Snootiness back. Steph doesn’t bother to ask for clarification—she knows he’ll just assume she needs it. 

“Either our suspect’s a dead hero who’s decided to up and throw his lot in with the drug scene,” Red Robin says pointedly. “Or we’re missing information that will lead us to a much simpler conclusion.”

“Well, maybe we’d have that information if you hadn’t lost track of him,” Steph can’t help but point out, even if winning a fight with a fictional character isn’t exactly one of the goals she’s proudest of having set for herself.

“I wouldn’t have lost track of him if you hadn’t distracted me,” Red Robin spits back, and Steph’s none-too-sure of the timeline, but she lets him have this anyways, even if it doesn’t quite make sense how the guy could’ve gotten from inside the laundromat to Red Robin in the time it took him to recognize Steph and warn her off.

“Okay, fine, then what is there to look for that didn’t just literally blow up in our faces?” Steph asks.

“I—we could—there’s—” Red Robin tries to bluff his way to an answer, but gives up pretty quickly. “We need help.”

“If you wanna tell Batman you disobeyed his direct orders and fucked up the case, be my guest,” Steph huffs.

“Pretty sure I wasn’t the only one there,” Red Robin points out, but Steph’s already let him win once in this conversation, and she’s not planning on yielding again anytime soon.

“Speak for yourself, I just wanted to do some laundry.”

“Really, laundry? In East Gotham? Sure,” Red Robin says, and okay, what the fuck. Who’s out here programming classism into her dumb escapist vigilante game.

“Maybe my mom forgot the whites last time she went,” Steph says, aiming for a gentle jab with words that come out far more sharply and far frostier than she intended.

“Oh,” is all Red Robin manages when he figures out the implication of her tone. He pauses for a moment, before awkwardly attempting to resume the subject.

“We could always try Nightwing,” he suggests.

Steph’s not sure Nightwing won’t just immediately tattle on them, but this will probably be her best shot at a positive introduction with him, if things continue down this road of—well, of getting worse and worse.

“You got a private channel with him?” Steph asks, and Red Robin gives the first indication she’s seen in the entire game that there’s at least the figment of a normal human person inside the suit when he pulls a cellphone—shiny and new, a Wendy the Werewolf Stalker case, and a small crack on the upper left hand corner of the screen—out of a pocket on his utility belt.

“You could say that,” Red Robin says, and gives Nightwing a call.

Nightwing climbs through the safehouse window about an hour after Red Robin calls him to action. 

“What case is Bats working that he hasn’t noticed you two missing?” he wants to know, and Steph answers at the same time as Red Robin, jealously muttering “paramilitary death squads” at the same time that he says, matter-of-fact, “investigating the mayor for corruption.”

Nightwing raises an eyebrow at the obvious discrepancy, but Steph refuses to back down from her unsubstantiated belief that she’s on the lamest run through and Batman’s case is way more exciting than this one. 

“Two things can be true,” she says, and Red Robin doesn’t seem to care to refute her. 

Nightwing seems to register that this is his first time meeting Steph, and studies her intently. Right from the get-go, Steph can tell he’s nicer than Red Robin, better in the people skills department, and this encounter was probably written to be a lot warmer than it feels. But no man has ever examined Steph like this without clear intent to underestimate her, and Nightwing is no exception to this rule. 

He finishes up his assessment, casually dropping a “I didn’t even know he was in the market for a new Robin till he told me your training was done.”

Steph had been hoping the first Robin would be easier to win approval from, but based on the way Red Robin doesn’t even look triumphant at hearing Nightwing’s dismissal, Steph wonders if the man has ever considered any Robin good enough to pass muster.

Maybe the dead one. Which, speaking of—

“There’s a new player in Gotham. B told us to lie low till we knew more, but we didn’t, so now we do—know more, I mean. He’s got it out for Red Robin and maybe tried to kill us?”

“Maybe?”

Red Robin clarifies. “It was the least effective murder attempt I’ve ever experienced—Robin got us both out.”

Steph bristles at how awful he makes it sound—of course it was ineffective, how else could Robin have made it out? Nevermind that she could’ve easily left his sorry ass to die. 

Nightwing tells them he wants to check out the site of the explosion for himself, and returns in less than fifteen minutes with Batman. Neither Steph nor Red Robin is surprised. 

“You should have known better,” the big guy says brusquely upon entering the safe house. 

For one horrible moment Steph feels more ashamed than she’s ever felt in her life, until the shame swaps out for pure vitriol when she realizes the “you” is only directed at Red Robin. Batman expected this of her. Batman doesn’t think she’s capable of “better.”

Their punishment starts out with Robin fired and Red Robin “suspended,” whatever that means in the vigilante context. Steph takes one look at Red Robin and knows that whatever else may happen, right now, he’s the only ally that matters, and immediately starts the process of begging on her fucking knees, or, well, what a more sophisticated gamer might call “negotiation.” Her own status doesn’t matter: as long as she can help Red Robin, he’ll owe her—and thanks to their brick-soured relationship, he’ll hate it. She manages to work Batman all the way down to babysitting duty and probation. 

They’ll work exclusively on cases he approves. They’ll only leave the cave with his permission. And—worst of fucking all—they have to swear they won’t get caught more than two blocks apart until Batman ends their probation. 

There is one silver lining—well, considering the situation, Steph figures it might be closer to aluminum. To tin? She’s not up to date on the values of various metals—in that when Batman takes over their case, he gives them the case he was working in exchange. Or, at least, assigns them the grunt work that can be accomplished from a distance or in the very early hours of the evening. 

The mayoral corruption investigation is not as exciting from behind a computer screen, and the antsier Red Robin gets, the antsier Steph feels. It doesn’t take long before they’re both itching to get out of the cave for any case at all—so Steph makes one up. 

Okay, she doesn’t exactly make it up. But the mayor’s funneling money that isn’t going into any account they can find, so Steph picks a likely culprit and fabricates a trail. Red Robin knows what she’s doing, he has to, but he doesn’t snitch, just suggests they take the evidence to Oracle, who’s been using the cave security system to act as their in-house babysitter. 

Except, Oracle looks at Steph’s fake trail, and sees something of actual merit, and suddenly Steph and Red Robin are on a Batman-approved field trip to a mystical place called the Clocktower, that turns out to be an actual clocktower. Steph’s pretty sure there’s a library where this building stands in the real world, and feels a momentary pang of sadness for the fictional students who have to check their textbooks out somewhere else in this version of Gotham. 

Oracle has a setup far more impressive than the Batcomputer running in her Clocktower, but she cuts one of the screens dark and turns towards them when they enter, all business in a way that kind of reminds Steph of her compsci professor last semester. Which is to say Steph feels equally terrified and inspired by this woman’s presence. 

“Mister Mayor—or, I should say, an account I was able to link to him—transferred fifteen thousand dollars to an account I couldn’t trace the night before your guy hit up that laundromat. Two minutes after footage of the explosion hit local news stations, another ten thousand left his account.”

“It’s the same case,” Steph realizes. 

“How much is left in the account?” Red Robin wants to know. 

“Fifteen thousand,” Oracle says with a wry grin. “You think maybe he just can’t cough up that last ten k?”

“Why bother cheating the guy out of his last transaction?” Steph asks. 

“Only logical explanation is he’s planning on taking all of it back,” Oracle says, turning back to her screen and directing someone struggling with the security system of a facility in—is that Metropolis? Geography is not one of Steph’s strong suits. 

“So the mayor stole a bunch of money from the city and is paying some guy to make space for him to start running the drug scene—and he’s decided the guy he’s been sending out to kill the baddest bitches in town is the right guy to tick off?” Steph questions, making sure she’s up to speed.

“Yup,” Oracle says, popping the p. “Good work on—well, okay, I did the work, but if you’d focused on actually looking for a trail instead of creating it, you’d have gotten there yourself by now. You guys can head back to the cave, I’ll let Batman know what’s up.”

Steph wants to protest—they don’t even have a case to work on anymore—but Red Robin pushes her half out the window before she can even get her mouth open.

“Come on, Robin. Let’s see if we can find that last victim in the cave files.”

“What, so we’re just back to being grounded again?” Steph asks, once they’re fully outside and no longer within earshot of Oracle’s expansive security system. 

“Like hell,” Red Robin says. “You saw the crime scenes this guy left in his wake. He left figureheads alive to avoid suspicion, but Black Mask, Maroni—they’re not idiots. They know these hits have to be coming from somewhere. Hood’s not an idiot either, he’s gotta know the mayor plans on scamming him. Batman’s on his trail right now, but—”

“—but when he gets word from Oracle, he’ll go to interrogate the mayor directly.” Steph finishes. 

“Trade with me,” Red Robin says, once he knows she’s caught on to the shit that’s about to go down. 

He’s already starting pulling off his gauntlet, so she does the same. It stings having to listen to Mr. Bossypants here, but somehow she thinks letting a gang war start isn’t the way to win this game. 

“Oracle’ll have to try a little extra hard to figure out what we’re up to this way,” he explains. 

“And what are we up to?”

“You’re going to do what I said—track down the last victim. I’m going straight after Hood. If we can keep him from finishing the contract, we can keep him from confronting the mayor, and with any luck, we can keep a turf war from boiling over at all.”

It seems like as solid a plan as any, and Steph kind of wonders now how it would go if she hadn’t told Red Robin she lived in the bowery, if Oracle would catch them because Red Robin’s tracker has no business on the East Side. 

They’ve gone over the list of likely victims again and again, but Red Robin’s gauntlet has some sort of jailbreak thing going on where she can see more records than even the Batcomputer had shown—Oracle’s notes, she realizes. Upon coming to that conclusion, she scrolls back to the most recent notification, and, shit. The last fifteen thousand dollars have left the account, accompanied with an outgoing message Oracle had somehow managed to catch and decrypt: “Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, he’s after you.”

The last hit is Batman. How the fuck is this guy gonna kill Batman.

She uses Red Robin’s jailbroken map to find Batman’s location—heading straight for City Hall, just like Red Robin had said. Even Hood can’t just tail Batman. If he’s after him, more likely than anything, he’ll be following the car—which means that’s Steph’s best bet, too. She takes off towards City Hall, hoping like hell that Red Robin’s hunt will find the guy before he even starts on tracking down the Bat. 

She’s four blocks from City Hall when Red Robin breaks radio silence, his call going out on the main channel. 

“Red Hood’s gotten through the security on the Batmobile,” is what his warning amounts to, but that car is practically a tank and the thought of this guy hacking into it before either of them could catch up chills her to the bone. 

Based on the whimper under Batman’s responding orders for Red Robin to return to the cave, he’s mid-interrogation with the mayor. 

“In a minute,” Red Robin replies, and doesn’t click off in time to keep them from hearing Red Hood’s modulated voice calling out a “we meet again, replacement.”

Grappling through the city might feel inhumanly fast, but it has its limits. By the time Steph’s close enough to see what’s happening, there’s no chance of stopping it. Red Hood’s got Red Robin cornered on the rooftop he must’ve gotten caught on—a familiar sight. Less familiar is the pistol aimed directly at Red Robin’s head as Hood dangles him over the edge of the roof. 

Steph doesn’t bother calling for backup. She can already see Batman’s void of a shadow approaching, already knows any help will be too late. 

She watches Red Hood start to pull the trigger—and a huge rumble shakes all of Gotham. Steph looks away as she stumbles forward to catch herself from falling, then back again as lightning, literal fucking lightning, strikes the spot she was just standing in, and a strong arm steadies her shoulder to prevent her from collapsing. Lightning has also struck the building Red Hood held Red Robin on—she only gets a split second’s glance, enough to see Red Robin grasping the edge of an open window on the top story and pulling himself in, before Batman’s full gaze is turned towards her and no one else. 

“You’ve disobeyed a direct order,” he says, blistering with rage, “and now we’ve lost a dangerous criminal and two vital operatives.”

“Two operatives?” Steph asks in shock because what the hell, they haven’t even lost one, but Hood probably did a number on Red Robin and he’s totally gonna be out for the count if he can’t get medical attention soon. 

“You’re fired. Effective immediately. Go home. I’ll take care of this.”

“You can’t fire me,” Steph protests. “This is a major emergency, what the hell? It was Red Robin’s idea, so fire him if you want, but that tremor was off the fucking Richter scale, people are gonna be hurt, you need—”

She’s cut off by Batman shooting her in the arm with a sedative. 

**Author's Note:**

> work title from sick little games by all time low. i've got the rest of this fully written minus edits and an epilogue so. it will all be posted soon hopefully! feel free to come yell at me on tumblr @[barbarawilson](https://barbarawilson.tumblr.com)


End file.
